Under Two Flags eBook

“No; you are too generous. But not the
less do I wish I could render them more worthily than
by words. If I live, I will try; if not, keep
this in my memory. It is the only thing I have.”

He put into her hand the ring she had seen in the
little bon-bon box; a ring of his mother’s that
he had saved when he had parted with all else, and
had put off his hand and into the box of Petite Reine’s
gift the day he entered the Algerian army.

Cigarette flushed scarlet with passions he could not
understand, and she could not have disentangled.

“The ring of your mistress! Not for me,
if I know it! Do you think I want to be paid?”

“The ring was my mother’s,” he answered
her simply. “And I offer it only as souvenir.”

She lost all her color and all her fiery wrath; his
grave and gentle courtesy always strangely stilled
and rebuked her; but she raised the ring off the ground
where she had flung it, and placed it back in his
hand.

“If so, still less should you part with it.
Keep it; it will bring you happiness one day.
As for me, I have done nothing!”

“You have done what I value the more for that
noble disclaimer. May I thank you thus, Little
One?”

He stooped and kissed her; a kiss that the lips of
a man will always give to the bright, youthful lips
of a women, but a kiss, as she knew well, without
passion, even without tenderness in it.

With a sudden impetuous movement, with a shyness and
a refusal that had never been in her before, she wrested
herself from him, her face burning, her heart panting,
and plunged away from him into the depth of the shadow;
and he never sought to follow her, but threw himself
into saddle as his gray was brought up. Another
instant, and, armed to the teeth, he rode out of the
camp into the darkness of the silent, melancholy,
lonely Arab night.

CHAPTER XXX.

SEUL aumonde.

The errand on which he went was one, as he was well
aware, from which it were a thousand chances to one
that he ever issued alive.

It was to reach a distant branch of the Army of Occupation
with dispatches for the chief in command there, and
to do this he had to pass through a fiercely hostile
region, occupied by Arabs with whom no sort of peace
had ever been made, the most savage as well as the
most predatory of the wandering tribes. His knowledge
of their tongue, and his friendship with some men
of their nation, would avail him nothing here; for
their fury against the Franks was intense, and it was
said that all prisoners who had fallen into their
hands had been put to death with merciless barbarities.
This might be true or not true; wild tales were common
among Algerian campaigners; whichever it were, he thought
little of it as he rode out on to the lonely plains.
Every kind of hazardous adventure and every variety
of peril had been familiar with him in the African
life; and now there were thoughts and memories on him
which deadened every recollection of merely physical
risk.